by Stephanie Baum ,
Blueprint Health has formed an interdisciplinary group inside and outside of healthcare to develop and assess new healthcare technologies earlier in an effort to reduce risk and to better predict the ROI of solutions earlier, according to a company statement. The Blueprint Health Collective will be totally separate from its New York City-based accelerator.
Initial members include Aetna, Allied Physicians Group, EmblemHealth, HP, Montefiore, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Razorfish Healthware, Sachs Policy Group, and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. But the plan is to expand it to include more members from big pharma, universities, and research foundations.
“Too often, corporations invest big dollars into finding new technologies that end up not meeting their priorities, do not easily integrate with their own
technology platforms or are too premature to scale,” said Doug Hayes an executive director at Blueprint Health. “As corporations vet the best new technology early on, we need a better way to keep risk in line with an expected return.”
Among the Collective’s areas of interest are niche, unmet challenges in healthcare such as pediatric medical devices, clinical decision support, using wearables in disease management, behavioral health in primary care settings. It held its first meeting last month and small working groups have been formed around areas such as thought leadership and co-development.
“The Collective represents a fundamental shift in the way we are connecting the large buyers and nimble producers of technology, Hayes said. “It’s an approach that’s been shown to evolve sectors and verticals much faster.”
He added: “What’s exciting about this model is you don’t need to be a hospital or a health system to join. This model can allow for different types of collaborations early.” It is designed to provide a way for peers to learn from each other in a setting where their interests are aligned.
Hayes was emphatic that the Collective is about building solutions– it wouldn’t be accurate to describe it as a think tank. It has no plans to sell research the Collective produces and it’s not designed to supplant or replace what its accelerator members are doing either, Hayes said.
It’s a pretty big milestone for Blueprint which has had six accelerator classes since 2012, adding up to 53 portfolio companies. It’s an interesting move since there’s been a lot of talk about the benefits of gathering insights from businesses outside of healthcare but relatively little action. Although they are separate entities by Hayes description, Blueprint’s accelerator is sure to benefit from the Collective’s work and ties to the wider group of companies with which it’s working.
